“With turns to the wild, clever, and magical
that seem at once fantastic and inevitable, Tiphanie Yanique has crafted a
beautiful collection of short and not-so-short fiction. This is an exciting new
voice.”
—PERCIVAL EVERETT
“Tiphanie Yanique is a writer to watch. Although How to Escape from a Leper Colony is her
debut, she writes with the wisdom and confidence of an old soul. The
title story alone is worth the price of admission, but each of the stories
contained in this gorgeous collection is clear-eyed, honest while still zinging
with emotion. Tiphanie Yanique is blessed with an electric imagination,
an expansive heart, and an unflinching gaze. I can't wait to see what she
does next.”
—TAYARI JONES
“These are fiercely original, poetic, and bold stories
from a writer who is a force to be reckoned with. I loved every minute of
this book and was in awe of nearly every paragraph.”
—CRISTINA HENRIQUEZ,
author of The World in Half
“In these powerful, poetic stories set in landscapes real
and imagined, Tiphanie Yanique explores beautifully race, family, and the
complicated movements of the heart.”
—CHITRA BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI,author of Sister of My Heart and The Palace of Illusions
“Let
us hail this new literary voice, vibrant, humorous, original and powerful.
These stories introduce us to a new world free of the old images and too familiar
clichés of the Caribbean.”
—MARYSE CONDE
“In this Widest of Sargasso Seas Tiphanie Yanique gives
us the pan-Caribbean, from the old lepers’ colony on Chacachacare, off the
coast of Trinidad, to St. John, Accra, and London. It’s an astonishing
debut collection—as brutal, sexual, magical, and seductively disturbing as if
Jean Rhys had written it today.”
—ROBERT ANTONI
“Tiphanie Yanique has a gift for writing about physical
displacement and the longing for connection that ensues. The unique
stories in How to Escape from a Leper
Colony meditate on confused expressions of love and spirituality in fresh
and surprising ways.”
—EMILY RABOTEAU
“How to Escape from
a Leper Colony is fiction of the first rank. Tiphanie Yanique explores the
ferociously complex terrain of her native Caribbean to show what it means to
live in a world where accidents of culture, country, history, race, and place
figure so bewilderingly in, as the author puts it, ‘the divine risks of love.’
Every single one of these extraordinary stories delivers a necessary
revelation. So few of us can hope to see with any clarity, much less make sense
of, this world, but Yanique—and we should be profoundly grateful for this—sees
and understands a very great deal indeed.”
—BEN FOUNTAIN
“This splendid debut collection reveals a storyteller of
multiple gifts and ample heart. Yanique’s writing is very fine, her characters
are authentic and memorable, and her vision is deeply humane.”
—SIGRID NUNEZ
“In How to Escape
from a Leper Colony, Tiphanie Yanique takes as her subject the outsider,
the immigrant, the uprooted. A boy
from Ghana is transplanted to Brixton, trading his palm-wine-drinking friends
in Accra for new football-playing mates.
A Gambian priest finds friendship in a coffin shop in the Caribbean; a
one-time Pentecostal leaves her birthplace and dons a burka in an effort to win
back her Muslim husband. The stories of these men and women, and the
extraordinary grace and sympathy with which they’re told, serve as urgent,
vivid reminders in this age of displacement and migration, of how powerfully
and urgently each human heart aches for its home.”
—KATHLEEN CAMBOR
“Tiphanie Yanique has written powerful stories, in
luminous prose, that reveal a Caribbean beyond tourist brochures, stories that
tell of human triumphs and failures. A wonderful read.”
